It Follows was a fluke. Under the Silver Lake is the anti-Sorry to Bother You, a surreal movie in the service of privilege envying those with more privilege as a guy tries to save the girl, not in recognition of their shared humanity in a system that values them based on their usefulness to others, but because she is the piece of ass that got away. Ultimately it is a personal story of heartbreak writ large in the language of global conspiracies because every man is the hero of his story, whether he deserves it or not, and this protagonist definitely does not even if he is brought to life by Andrew Garfield. If you can view it as a comedy, you may enjoy it, and I giggled on occasion, but it is too damn long, and I wouldn’t recommend it. I like weird, artsy fartsy movies so if I’m warning you to stay away, trust me.
The main problem of Under the Silver Lake is that if you keep shouting at me that everything is meaningless, I’ll pull a Maya Angelou, believe you and stop getting invested in your absurd web of intrigue. Viewers who try to get into the deeper significance of this movie are in a trap. The movie invites such speculation while simultaneously ridiculing the empty lives of those obsessed with the creations of better men, which are made then swiftly forgotten like feces that didn’t get flushed in the toilet bowl. And if you think being a creator makes you a person filled with a depth of feeling, this movie will do its best to dissuade you of that notion. Never meet your heroes. It aggressively makes you to feel as empty as its protagonist.
The heart of this movie is envy at men who may be more successful, but are just as devoid of humanity as our protagonist and his friends. These people literally and figuratively feel like white sepulchers. They’re all id-looking for the next thing that satisfies their basic urges. Even if it is the point, and it is executed perfectly, spending two hours and nineteen minutes with them is enervating. Our protagonist is the first person that I actively rooted for him to get evicted. He is a man who gets disproportionately rewarded for doing nothing and feels as if he deserves more. He has hungry eyes, and he and his friends worry about being victims while being perpetrators of the very thing that they believe is being inflicted upon them. They’re not stars. They’re not victims. They feed off the crumbs from and are ultimately protected by a system that they hate and desperately want to be a part of. He is even valued more than a woman with a higher status than him because of her relationship to a powerful man.
Under the Silver Lake depicts an extreme version of the world that we live in. Men try to make money to get women. In Mormon fundamentalist neighborhoods, the boys get exiled so they can’t compete for the girls. Fish don’t know they’re in water, and what makes this movie so unsatisfying for me though it may (God forbid) perfectly depict the America that we live in is that instead of sparking outrage, solidarity and change, they are resigned to it. They’re trying to make the best of it. One woman who was a baby actor accepts her role in a system that commodifies her sexuality because she was on the market for a hot second before she could consent. The protagonist is more disturbed when someone is taken off the market than the fact that there is a market at all.
Under the Silver Lake’s thesis is that everything that you care about does not matter because it is rooted in that system. “Your art, your culture, is the shells of the ambition of men that you will never understand.” Except these men are really easy to understand, but they think that they’re so important thus they’re deep. They are almost as lame as our protagonist because they create a fiction to make them feel more consequential than they are, which is desperately sad. You’re already important and are still so insecure. During the sequence when this quote is mentioned, I’ve never seen such anger directed at the film’s god since Roy Batty’s confrontation with his creator in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. They’re angry that they’re not special and feel manipulated.
The creators as they are depicted in Under the Silver Lake are wrong. The creation process does not stop with the creator. You’re simultaneously not special and special. People take products then reinterpret and change them from their original and/or intended purpose all the time. The consumer’s projection of meaning is only as valuable as the soul doing the projecting. Because this protagonist wants to belong and his motivations are selfish and limited, he keeps finding mirror images of himself that disgust him. Once the creation is placed in others’ hands, the creator no longer retains sole control. It can be as basic as the tin of butter cookies being transformed into a storage container that evokes memories of family and holding new possibilities of creation to something as lofty as religious concepts being transformed from tools of oppression into instruments of liberation.
While I applaud David Robert Mitchell’s commitment to an unreliable narrator and his enthusiasm to take the great auteurs’ genres and techniques then make them his own, which he succeeded in doing with John Carpenter, we already have a Roman Polanski, who was immersed in tragedy and came out on the other side a horrible human being, and Polanski’s Hitchcock inspired film noirs are far more satisfying: Chinatown, The Tenant, The Ghost Writer, etc. What most annoys me about Under the Silver Lake is that in spite of its commitment, it never completely embraces bleakness and oblivion like Polanski and instead ultimately settles for a sedate compromise and acceptance in exchange for survival and pleasure while somehow not being spiritually or financially enriched by the experience. A whole lot of energy was expended to basically end up where you could have started. Ugh!
I did not know anything about Under the Silver Lake before seeing it other than the trailer, which I didn’t like and saw around the same time as Come and Find Me, which have similar premises, but utterly different purposes. I should have trusted my instincts and stayed away. While watching the film, I felt as if they needed someone like Dakota Fanning to pull it off, and apparently she was supposed to be in the movie, but she couldn’t have done all the heavy lifting. Because we’re seeing women through the protagonist’s eyes, it was always going to be problematic even if that was the point. The closest that I felt to the film was the balloon girl, and not even.
Even though I haven’t seen Inherent Vice, it appears that people who enjoyed that film loved Under the Silver Lake. Even though I want to see every Paul Thomas Anderson film, such comparisons make me want to run in the other direction so Inherent Vice can wait. After seeing Mitchell’s latest film, it makes me appreciate Boots Riley more.
